Because I Can't Stop Talking about Books and Politics

Monthly Archives: October 2017

That’s right, I’m studiously ignoring the elephant in the room to bring you five books that concern the Kennedy assassination. (If you do not already know, the president is eager to tell you that the Kennedy files were released this week on his watch. Pay no attention to the fact that this release was scheduled back in 1992; Donald J. Trump presided over their 2017 release and that is all that matters.) There’s no question that Americans have been fascinated by the assassination for years, and you can make an argument that there’s a straight line connecting the conspiracy theories that surround Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to today’s Birthers and fake news purveyors.

At any rate, I cannot resist an opportunity to recommend Adam Braver. (Please, people, read more Adam Braver.)

So here we go. Five books to read when considering the Kennedy assassination:

President Kennedy: Profile of Power, by Richard Reeves. There isn’t a lot of dirt here, but it is a closely detailed look at the Kennedy presidency, which is truly fascinating if you want to look past the mythology and learn more about what kind of president John F. Kennedy really was.

November 22, 1963, by Adam Braver. An impressionistic, fictional take on the day that Kennedy was shot, told from many different perspectives. The theme here is memory and history and their relationship. Brilliantly done. It’s a shame this book isn’t better known.

Libra, by Don DeLillo. A well-known fictionalized account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, possibly DeLillo’s best novel. I confess I haven’t read it since grad school, but it strikes me that DeLillo’s conspiratorial sensibility is an amazingly good match for our current time.

Lincoln in American Memory, by Merrill D. Peterson. OK, so this book isn’t actually about Kennedy. It is, however, about how Americans turn fallen presidents into cultural icons and so I think it speaks to the way we remember Kennedy today.

Burning is an art.
I remove my shirt and step toward a table where I have spread out the tools I will need. I swab my entire chest and shoulders with synthetic alcohol. My body is white against the black of space where we hover within a suborbital complex. CIEL.
Through the wall-size window I can see a distant nebula; its gases and hypnotic hues make me hold my breath. What a puny word that is, beautiful. Oh, how we need a new language to go with our new bodies.

And on the next page:

There is a song lodged in my skull, one whose origin I can’t recall. The tune is both omnipresent and simultaneously unreachable; the specifics drift away like space junk. There are times I think it will drive me mad, and then I remember that madness is the least of my concerns.
Today is my birthday, and pieces of the song from nowhere haunt my body, a sporadic orchestral thundering that rises briefly and then recedes.

Not the kind of thing I usually post, but Jeff Flake’s retirement speech is going to be in the history books someday:

When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say? Mr. President, I rise today to say, enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal.

With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, civility and stability right behind it.

We know better than that.

Will this be enough to wake up Trump’s base? Probably not. But someday something will.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that Senator Flake means it when he says he will spend the remaining fourteen months of his term “stand[ing] up and speak[ing] out.”

Well, it has been quite the week, hasn’t it? Look, you can argue that the whole debate over which presidents called Gold Star families and which ones didn’t and what did Trump say to the pregnant war widow has been an overblown distraction. And I get the argument, but ultimately I think this controversy is pretty significant. First, because it speaks to the president’s tendency to respond to criticism with a torrent of untruths and abuse (and also revealed the his chief of staff’s propensity for the same, which was extremely disappointing). This combined, with the press secretary’s announcement that it was “highly inappropriate” to argue with a four-star general, illuminates the current administration’s authoritarian leanings and should alarm everyone with an interest in the United States remaining a democratic republic.

So there’s that. But also, John Kelly has a point–a point that would have been more effective if he hadn’t tacked on a bunch of sanctimonious drivel about how women used to be sacred and a gratuitous and inaccurate attack on Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, but a point nonetheless: the average American doesn’t know a ton about the military and doesn’t have a good feel for what happens when a soldier returns home, especially if the soldier is coming home for the last time. And so I offer these five reading suggestions.

Thank You For Your Service, by David Finkel. I read this book when it was first published in 2013 and I was blown away. Thank You for Your Service is about what happens to a group of soldiers who spent fifteen months in Baghdad when they return to the United States. Finkel has amazing access and the subjects of his book trust him and he writes about them with great sensitivity. This book is a sequel, of sorts, to The Good Soldiers, which Finkel wrote about the same battalion when they were on duty in Iraq. (I haven’t read The Good Soldiers.) If you only read one book on this list, this should be the one.

Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, by Elizabeth D. Samet. This is a memoir by a former professor of English at West Point. It’s an interesting account of a Harvard-educated politically liberal woman dealing with military hierarchy and learning about the ways her more conservative, bound-for-war students think about themselves and the classics of literature. I like it because I think it challenges stereotypes on both sides; I can’t think of anyone, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum, who could read this and not see the military a little differently.

Redeployment, by Phil Klay. A book of short stories about soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, by a former soldier who served in Iraq. I still wish Klay had written a memoir instead of a book of short stories, but this book still provides a window into the lives of those who are actually fighting the wars.

You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon. This book is the reverse of the previous one: a collection of short stories about the families who are left behind when soldiers go to war. Fallon, no surprise, is a military wife, and she writes about the stresses and terrors of having your husband on the frontlines in another country very movingly.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. For most Americans today losing a child or a spouse in Iraq or Afghanistan is an abstract concept; we murmur our sympathy but it’s not really a part of the everyday world we inhabit. It was very different for Americans who lived during the Civil War, and in this book Faust writes about how civilians and former soldiers reconciled themselves to the horrible human cost of the war, and how they grappled with the deaths once the war was over. It’s instructive to think about a world in which war deaths are much, much more common than they are today, and perhaps makes it a little easier to imagine what it would feel like if it were your child or spouse who wasn’t coming home.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

On Monday, the president held an ad hoc press conference and the White House press asked him a reasonable question: has he contacted the families of the four soldiers who died in a military operation in Niger?

Here’s what the president could have said: “Unfortunately I haven’t yet contacted them, but I plan to do so immediately.” And then his staff could have cobbled together four letters of condolence, and he could have signed them, and they could have been sent, and the Trump administration could have congratulated itself on avoiding another self-inflicted nightmarish news cycle.

What the president did instead was to claim that Obama never called, and other former presidents never called, but what he liked to do was call and send a letter. He made a clumsy attempt at walking this back, but then he instructed his press secretary to double down on it.1

On Tuesday the president made phone calls to the four bereaved families. On Tuesday night it emerged that, according to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who heard the call on speakerphone, the president had said “He knew what he signed up for” to a pregnant war widow.2

Again we are at a crossroads. Here’s what the president could have said: “I am very sorry for Mrs. Johnson’s loss and I feel terrible that I increased her pain in any way.”

Instead, on Wednesday morning Trump again doubled down, tweeting that the congresswoman was lying and he had proof.

This tweet, like so many, spawned dozens of news stories. The Washington Post started calling the families of soldiers who had died since Trump took office. Subcontroversies sprang up and then popped like soap bubbles all day: One family was instructed to wait by the phone for a presidential call that never came. One man was promised a personal check for $25,000 that also never arrived. (The check is now, reportedly, in the mail.)

And then yesterday, John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff gave an extraordinary press conference, in which he lost me entirely and forever. I’ll grant you that the part of the statement in which he talks about how the bodies of soldiers who die are returned to the country, and how the families of the fallen learn of their loved ones’ fates are very moving. And I do believe that Kelly, who lost his own son in combat, cares deeply about the troops. But because Kelly occupies one of the most powerful offices in the country, we should not allow those parts of the statement, or his own status as a Gold Star father to obfuscate other salient points:

Kelly confirmed the essence of what the congresswoman said about the call. So if you were waiting for “proof” that she was lying, you are probably not going to get that.

If Kelly is really upset that respect for women has diminished, he should probably not be working for President Grab Them By the Pussy.3

If Kelly is really upset that respect for Gold Star families has diminished, he should probably not be working for the man who devoted several days to attacking Gold Star father Khizr Khan because he was mean to him at the Democratic National Convention.

Kelly can’t reasonably complain that Congresswoman Wilson (who has been a Johnson family friend for decades) should not have been “listening in” on the condolence call when he just said he was also listening to it.

Bringing up a speech that Congresswoman Wilson allegedly made about a totally different subject in 2015 is a transparent attempt at deflection4, particularly since he had already confirmed the essence of what she said. While we’re on the subject, calling her “someone that is that empty a barrel” does not exactly drip with respect for women. I thought women were “sacred,” General Kelly?

Kelly wants to make it seem as though the White House press has been terribly mistreating the Trump administration over expressions of condolence all week. No doubt that’s how Trump’s base wants to see it. And I’ve come to expect these delusions of martyrdom from Trump, but I honestly thought Kelly was smart enough and self-aware enough not to succumb to them.

This controversy is entirely the president’s fault. He was asked a fair question, and he bungled it, and then he continued to bungle everything related to it all week long. As always, he made multiple statements that were not true, and then doubled down on them, and then cried foul when they were found to be not true. Checking the president’s statements is what the White House press is supposed to do, because as a citizen, you should know–and you should care–if the president is lying to you. And you should care that the administration cannot summon up the minimum competence required to write and mail four letters of condolence in two weeks, because if they can’t do that, how are they going to handle an actual crisis?

Meanwhile the president is once again tweeting about the “wacky” congresswoman who “gave a total lie on content!” So clearly this week has been a fabulous learning experience for him.

1 I’m assuming he doubled down on it, because I’m assuming Sarah Huckabee Sanders is smart enough to realize that “The president misspoke” was the wise move in this situation.

2 My own theory about this is that John Kelly, in an attempt to help the president say something appropriate, suggested something about the sergeant’s willingness to put his life on the line and Trump’s brain scrambled it into “He knew what he signed up for.” I’m willing to believe the president wasn’t actively trying to make the aforesaid pregnant war widow cry harder. Which is apparently what he did.

3 I have an entire side rant about how treating women as “sacred” (as opposed to treating everyone with respect) is terrible for the world, but I’m restraining myself. You’re welcome.

4 In a particularly Trumpian twist, Congresswoman Wilson disputes Kelly’s account of her speech. Apparently no one’s unearthed a tape yet. But if Kelly couldn’t confirm it, then the story shouldn’t have made it into the statement, especially since what Wilson said about something else in 2015 is not remotely the point.

I am reading Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine) this morning, and was amused to discover that 169 years ago, helicopter parents were already a problem:

If people would but leave children to themselves; if teachers would cease to bully them; if parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts, and dominating their feelings—those feelings and thoughts which are a mystery to all (for how much do you and I know of each other, of our children, of our fathers, of our neighbour, and how far more beautiful and sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to be, than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules him?)—if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a little more, small harm would accrue. . . .